


With a Love I Seemed to Lose

by havocthecat



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Angst, F/M, Het, Post-Series, Romance, lost loves found
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-10
Updated: 2014-12-10
Packaged: 2018-02-28 22:36:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,455
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2749655
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/havocthecat/pseuds/havocthecat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>She's whole again. This body, this human body, is one John has never touched and one he's never seen. Every part of her wants to go to him, to run to him and Atlantis. She can't.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	With a Love I Seemed to Lose

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mylittleredgirl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mylittleredgirl/gifts).



> Thank you SO MUCH to mylittleredgirl, who has been extremely patient with me while I've been waiting to post this, and who thought her beta commentary killed the story - but she was wrong. It made the story ten times better!

_I love thee with a love I seemed to lose  
With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,  
Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,  
I shall but love thee better after death._  
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, excerpts from [How Do I Love Thee? (Sonnet 43)](http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/how-do-i-love-thee-sonnet-43)

***

She settles on Sietynas. It's a low-tech urban community, though the cities sit empty unless there's a harvest or a market. It's one of thousands of adaptations made against the Wraith. She's propositioned a good dozen times in her first year. She turns them all down with a graceful smile. The proposals slow down after that, but they don't stop. She never thinks about accepting them.

Elizabeth lives in a small cottage near the ocean. It doesn't smell like Atlantis, or even like Earth, but the sound of the waves comforts her. The furnishings are spare, not cluttered, and it's easy to keep clean - except her work area. She uses paper instead of computers, and paper has a way of multiplying. 

All of Elizabeth's marketable skills are in negotiation and management. It's a barely post-agrarian industrial society trying to adapt to shifting cultural mores, so there's plenty of conflict to go around. She develops a reputation for having a sound head in a crisis. The Wraith and Replicator scanner proof bunker she constructs doesn't hurt that in the slightest.

There's no council of elders like on Athos, just a group of women and men who get asked for advice, enough that they start talking to each other. Elizabeth tries to stay out of the thick of things, keeps quiet by using her middle name. "Elizabeth Weir" is a beacon to every Replicator and Wraith within a hundred planets. She doesn't mean to get drawn in, but she's the acknowledged expert in all things having to do with the Ancients. 

When take her to an underground complex of Ancient ruins, Elizabeth discovers that no one else can read the language, much less speak it. She translates the activation codes. It takes her at least a year to convince everyone she's not an Ancient. She lets herself be talked into teaching the history of the Ancients to roving bands of children. They still call them the Ancestors, even after years of learning about them.

One morning, Elizabeth walks on the beach, her hands wrapped around a mug of tea, when a messenger arrives. He says that the Ancestors have returned. He says that they're asking for help, that they need someone to guide them to the complex. 

It doesn't matter what they want. Behind him, just out of reach and yet closer than she ever expected, stands John Sheppard. He's thicker around his midsection, and the corners of his eyes are wrinkled. He looks weathered. Ronon is with him, his hair shot through with grey. Two people Elizabeth don't recognize stand behind them.

Everything stops. Elizabeth's universe has narrowed to John's face. She can't breathe. She can't move. Atlantis could be a thousand miles away, it could be a million miles, or ten million. It doesn't matter. Ronon has leveled his gun at her. She doesn't care. She never thought she'd see John again, but he's here. He's here with her.

John turns and walks away. For just an instant, she had hoped. For just an instant, she had thought she could go home.

"He thinks you're another Replicator," says Ronon, his voice gruff. He keeps his gun pointed at her. "Are you?"

It takes time for her to find her voice. "It doesn't matter," she says, turning and walking back to her cottage. Ronon could shoot her. She's not afraid. She accepted years ago that she might die at her own people's hands.

He doesn't. She closes the door behind her and sits near the window, listening to the ocean and smelling the salt spray. She remembers rebuilding herself, cell by cell, with the help of Ancient technology. She remembers how painful it was. She remembers glorying in every single gray hair and wrinkle that proves how human she is.

The sun sets, and Elizabeth grows cold. She stokes the fire and, as she drifts off to sleep, thinks to herself that John and Ronon have left by now.

***

She steps outside the next morning and Teyla is waiting for her. Her arms are crossed and she gives Elizabeth that _look_ , the one eyebrow she raises for the foolish. Her hair is white, but she is as strong and as beautiful as ever.

"Why have you been hiding yourself away?" she asks. "Why did you not return to us?"

"You aren't going to ask if I'm a Replicator too?" asks Elizabeth, raising one eyebrow right back at Teyla. 

"I pointed out to both John and to Ronon that if you've aged, you're likely not a Replicator," she says. Her mouth twists and she looks exasperated. "They had not thought of it. They only knew that you had not come home and thought you another clone."

Elizabeth laughs. It's only a little hysterical. "I couldn't find you," she says, and there are tears in her eyes. "I looked, but I couldn't find you."

"Oh," says Teyla, and it seems like none of them had thought of it. "Yes, I can see how that would make returning difficult."

"Come in," says Elizabeth, because she needs to sit down. Her knees hurt. "Have some tea."

It's nothing like Earth tea, nothing like Athosian tea, but close enough to both that it will do. Making it is the same process in both galaxies; the cosmetic differences are cultural, but it's still just leaves and herbs steeped in water. She brews it strong and hopes her memories of Teyla's preferences match up. 

Teyla sips at the tea, then grimaces and blows on its surface. "I have become less tolerant of scalding my tongue over the years."

"It doesn't taste right unless it starts out hot," says Elizabeth. She sets her cup down in front of her to let it cool. "It's been a while."

She's not sure how long it's been. Her sense of time passing had started to fade once she'd put herself back in a human body. She's not sure if it was planet-hopping from one rotation around the sun to another, too a years on a Replicator ship, or too many years as a prisoner. It could be all three, she supposes.

"It has been twenty Earth years and eighteen Athosian cycles," says Teyla. There's something fierce in her voice when she continues. "Every day, for so many years, I wondered if I could have done something different--"

"Don't," says Elizabeth, cutting her off. She can't go down that road. She _can't_. "I made my choice."

"Did you think of the costs to us?" asks Teyla. She's pained, and Elizabeth can't blame her. Twenty years. Oh God, no wonder John walked away. She must be like a ghost to him, one that turned up again and again like a punishment. Like the universe had wanted to make him suffer for failing to protect her.

"I was dead the minute that energy beam hit me," says Elizabeth, and she knows, with everything that she is, that this is true. "Re-activating those nanites was a mistake. We all know Rodney doesn't think about the consequences when he's emotional. The only thing I could do was let my death mean something instead of becoming a risk to you and the entire city." 

To John, who never would have abandoned her any other way except in a foolish, suicidal stunt to save everyone else. He never would have seen her as a risk. 

"Except you did not die," said Teyla, somber and angry, and Elizabeth doesn't know why.

"No one is more surprised than me," says Elizabeth, and then drinks her tea. There's nothing else to say.

***

She returns to Atlantis with Teyla, because once it's out that she's Elizabeth Weir, half the Sietynasians recoil from her in horror and the other half look at her in awe. Neither one appeals to her, and besides, she needs either protection or anonymity. If she can't have the latter, the former will have to do. She has too many enemies to think anything else is an option.

Evan Lorne is back on Earth, with three stars on his shoulders and in charge of Stargate Command. He grins at her on the weekly check-in and asks if she wants to come back to Earth. Only about half the expedition ever did, it turns out. The other half have fallen in love with Pegasus and won't leave. Elizabeth has been part of the latter half since the first time she saw Lantea's skies. Teyla's learned to play Earth and Milky Way politics just as well as Pegasus, and has put herself in charge of the Atlantis expedition as a whole.

It turns out that John is a full Colonel. He was too insubordinate to bring back to Earth, but he's still in charge of Atlantis' military. He stays on a desk these days thanks to arthritis unless a rumor of Ancient technology turns up. His ATA gene is still the strongest in the city. He also still won't talk to her. 

Rodney is on Earth, heading up Area 51 and pursuing a neverending scientific rivlary with General Carter, who heads up Homeworld Security. Sam says it's good-natured these days. Ronon nods at her sometimes, still suspicious, but he thaws enough to eat with her at least once a week. Carson is unbelievably, miraculously alive, but has to break the news that Kate died too soon after Elizabeth was taken. Laura Cadman is back on Atlantis, a Lieutenant Colonel up for promotion soon and in charge of the jumper pilots.

Too many nights, Elizabeth stands on her old balcony and stares out at the ocean. She doesn't have much to do here, so she helps translate the database and explore the last corners of the city. It's unofficial, of course, since Teyla and Evan are still trying to push through the paperwork to reverse the declaration of her death. If she were to be asked, though, Elizabeth would have to admit she doesn't care. She threw in her lot with this galaxy a long time ago, and none of the planets she's been to have bureaucracy like Earth does. 

After a week, she realizes that, while John won't talk to her, he will watch her. He starts coming to meals when she does. He takes walks and follows up on scientist's explorations more than he has in years, but only when Elizabeth is with them. The years haven't made him any more comfortable with feelings. When she asks Teyla, all she gets is an exasperated sigh and a comment about how John has only become more himself with time.

One day, she finds a clay pot on the floor outside her quarters. She bends down and traces the designs with her fingertips. It's the one he gave her their first year. He saved it. She picks it up and hopes her hair is long enough to hide her face as she rushes into her room.

She sets it down on a table and goes to take a shower. The running water hides her tears. 

There's no mainland to hide out on any more, and the expedition has more than quadrupled in size. Elizabeth starts taking walks along the piers. Cold, wet spray from the ocean doesn't bother her. She doesn't know how to do this, how to come back and be a part of this expedition. Too many people look on her as a legend - or a horror. 

Teyla comes to her quarters at least once a week for tea or for dinner. Laura invites her for ladies' poker night, and, after the first half dozen times, Elizabeth takes her up on it. Teyla is there, and half a dozen women Elizabeth doesn't recognize. When one of them makes a dirty joke, she laughs for the first time since coming back to Atlantis. She leaves Laura's quarters, turns the corner and runs into John.

"Ow," she says, falling back. She touches her head gingerly. There's already a bump swelling. She'll have to stop by the mess to pick up some ice.

"Are you okay?" says John. He has his open palm flattened against his forehead. He looks up and realizes who he's talking to and shuts down. "Oh. You're okay."

"I'm not a Replicator anymore," she says, and she's so tired of explaining it. 

"I know," says John. All of a sudden he's drained. All his fire is gone, but he won't stop looking at her. Won't stop staring. "I can't lose you again."

"John." Her heart goes out to him. He's been hurt so many times. "I'm here. It's me."

"I don't--" He shakes his head. "I stopped believing after the first three times I saw you."

"Then you're an idiot," says Elizabeth. She knows what most of those clones have done. She was some of them, under the influence of the Replicators, and she's had the memories of the others forced into her. There's no way to prove to John that she won't leave him again. She won't make promises she can't keep. 

So she doesn't promise anything. She's done with that. She kisses John instead, shoving his hand away from his forehead and stepping close. He doesn't move. He's trembling, stiff and tense, torn between pushing her away and pulling her close. She lays one hand on his shoulder, splays the fingers of her other hand against John's side, and opens her mouth to him. He shudders and fists his hands in her shirt. He groans, long and drawn-out, still torn. Still wanting her. Still afraid.

Elizabeth smiles against his lips, triumphant. Twenty years and uncounted bodies between them since they've touched, and she can still read him like a book. Closer than a book, more intimate than printed words on a page. She's studied every inch of his skin, mapped it under her fingers, and the sense memory remains even if the neurons were rebuilt. "Come to bed. With me."

"I can't," he groans, leaning into her like he's breathing her in, drowning in her. "I can't let you get close. You'll vanish again."

She steps past John and pivots to face him. He swallows. "Maybe I'll be gone again soon," she says. "Maybe you will. Let's not waste the time we have."

"Elizabeth--" he says her name, says it and believes she's her for the first time in twenty years. She has him.

"Let's go to my quarters, John," she says softly. He walks beside her every step of the way.

\--end--


End file.
